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Coronavirus forced cancellation of girl's school trip to Spain; now her mom wants her money back

An Andover woman is suing EF Education Tours of Cambridge for the $4,180 she says she paid for her daughter's school trip to Spain that had been scheduled for April.

In a suit filed yesterday in US District Court in Boston, Amy Corrigan is also seeking the return of the $165 she paid for trip insurance, which has a clause saying it would reimburse her if the trip were canceled due to "quarantine." Corrigan is also seeking to become lead plaintiff in a class action against the company.

In her complaint, Corrigan's attorney writes that EF offered to reimburse her all but $1,000 of the payment, but that it has refused to hand over even that. EF, the suit alleges, said the insurance only covered "quarantine" for somebody who was actually sick and so told by a doctor they had to shelter in place. The complaint essentially retorts: Seriously now? It notes that both Spain and Massachusetts took strong measures to combat the spread of Covid-19, including telling people to stay at home (mandatory in Spain; advisory in Massachusetts) and ordering schools and many businesses shut.

Webster’s New 20th Century defines quarantine as "any isolation or restriction on travel imposed to keep contagious diseases, insect pests, etc. from spreading."

Black's Law Dictionary defines quarantine as "The keeping of persons, when suspected of having been exposed to an infectious disease, out of a community, or to confine them to given place therein, and to prevent intercourse between them and people generally of the community."

The suit asks a judge to order EF to never do something like this again and repay everybody affected by the cancellation of the tours, plus damages and attorney's fees.

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PDF icon Complete complaint303.15 KB


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Comments

I hope she wins. My son's trip in February 2015 was constantly under cancellation threat and EF was not only non-responsive to the trip leaders, they put out an e-mail to policy holders trying to "bullsplain" how the trip insurance coverage for "weather cancellation" didn't include nor'easters closing the airport or some similar nonsense ahead of time.

Needless to say, the lawyer parents of kids in the group were not impressed.

The students managed to squeek out during a lull on Feb 12 and snuck back in before the Snowbomb Season Finale, but EF trip insurance is garbage and fuckall rot "bonus profit" for their pockets, despite what the policy actually says.

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In my decade of experience as a teacher, I’ve organized a couple of student trips and chaperoned several others. I have never been impressed by EF; they really seem to be a company explicitly focused on making profit rather than paying anything more than lip service to satisfying their customers.

I and other teachers I know have had wonderful experiences with BrightSpark.

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